Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 28 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
K-LO is losing her mind:
SPARING ELK A PAINFUL DEATH [K. J. Lopez]
“Five stranded elk shot; they faced slow starvation”
Posted at 09:01 AM
So we should shoot Terri Schiavo with a high-powered rifle?
“THE COWS SUFFERED TREMENDOUSLY.” [K. J. Lopez]
Vermont farmer prosecuted for starving his cattle to death.
You are comparing Terri Schiavo to farm animals?
*** Edited for the sake of clarity ***
by John Cole| 16 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Boortz is making sense:
So, there he was … Randall Terry, the anti-abortion zealot, screaming outside of the nursing home housing Terri Schiavo. He was screaming something about “hell to pay” if Terri Schiavo dies. He then went on to rant a bit about all of the work that the anti-abortion movement did to elect these Republicans, and that now is the time for them to deliver and perform.
You know what? This time Randall Terry may just be right. There just may be a political price to pay. But Terry is right for the wrong reasons. Republicans may pay a political price not because they didn’t do enough to prolong the torture of Terri Schiavo, but because they did too much.
Have you seen today’s approval ratings for President Bush? They’re down. Way down. He’s down to 45%. He was at 52% one week ago. This is the lowest point in his presidency. These polls are not because he hasn’t done enough in the Schiavo matter. The downtrend is because he did too much. The largest loss of support was among conservative male church-goers. A majority of the American people were not impressed with the Republican Party’s late night grandstanding this past Sunday, and Bush’s rush back to Washington to sign a bill in the early hours of the morning.
Maybe conservative Republican politicians can learn a lesson from this. They were elected to reduce the size and intrusiveness of the Imperial Federal Government of the United States. They were elected to reduce our tax burden and lower government spending. They were elected to defend us against threats from abroad, specifically the threat of Islamic terrorism … and to do so with preemptive action if necessary. In spite of the delusions of grandeur of the abortocentrist crowd and religious extremists, George Bush was not elected to facilitate a government takeover of the ovaries of every fertile American woman, nor was he elected to establish a theocracy.
Perhaps Republicans will take note. I truly believe that their control of the House of Representatives may be in jeopardy in next year’s elections. Perhaps they’ll learn from this. Maybe they’ll start dancing with who brung them for a change, and pay attention to spending and tax cuts, school choice, national defense and individual liberty.
Some lessons are just learned the hard way.
The leadership in our party has lost their way. If they ever had a way, and weren’t just selling me a bill of goods.
This post is in: Sports
Great piece onthe Mountaineers in the WaPo. They take on Louisville at 4ish this afternoon for a spot in the Final Four.
This post is in: War
From all places, the front page of the NY Times:
All the same, much has improved since residents first returned to a nearly deserted city almost three months ago.
On a tour of the city’s central neighborhoods with an American convoy, civilian cars and taxis could be seen cruising the streets. Customers shopped at fruit and vegetable markets, and a crowd waited outside a new branch of the Rafidain Bank.
At the Palestine School, where classes started again two months ago, the cheerful shrieks of students could be heard in the hallways.
“Things are almost back to normal here,” said the headmaster, Samer Eyd Jawhar, 60, a portly man in a light blue jacket and tie. “We have teachers and books. Things are getting better.”
Everywhere, there are complaints about the strict military control of the city. Najim Abed, the director of an emergency clinic, said its one ambulance often has trouble getting in and out of the city. It is also hard to reach patients at night, because the ambulance must be accompanied by a military patrol, he said.
Read the whole thing- there are problems, but the place is improving.
by John Cole| 15 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
When I state repeatedly (and hysterically, as some have commented) that the extremists are taking unprecedented measures to have their way, and that this is destroying our democracy and our system of justice, I am talking about things like this:
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted — but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called “a showdown.”
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
”We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,” said a source with the local police.
”The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,” said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. “When the sheriff’s department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.”
The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday’s events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge’s order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge’s order whenever an agency appeals it.
Read the whole thing. Then, an exercise. Ask yourself who should have the authority to be making the decisions regarding Terri Schiavo.
The Florida Circuit Courts?
The Appeals Courts?
The Florida Supreme Court?
The United States Supreme Court?
Governor Bush?
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement?
The Department of Children and Families?
The National Right to Life group?
The US House of Representatives?
Randall Terry?
Tom DeLay?
Bill Frist?
The United States Senate?
Sean Hannity?
If you answered anything other than Michael Schiavo, you are part of the problem.
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
And the violence and calls for violence from the lunatic followers of scum like Brian Mahoney and Randall Terry, just as I predicted, begins.
A man arrested in Buncombe County Friday was charged with threatening the husband of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of the right-to-die case gripping the country.
Richard Alan Meywes was arrested in Fairview by the FBI and the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI said in a prepared statement.
Meywes is accused of sending an e-mail putting a $250,000 bounty “on the head of Michael Schiavo” and another $50,000 to eliminate a judge who denied a request to intervene in the Schiavo case, the FBI said. The FBI did not immediately identify the judge.
“The e-mail also made reference to the recent death of a judge in Atlanta and the death of (a) judge’s family members in Illinois,” the FBI said.
Meywes faces federal charges of murder for hire and transmission of interstate threatening communications.
Sane Republicans better start to come to grips with what we have created.
by John Cole| 16 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
I agree with Sidney Blumenthal:
The politics of piety were transparently masked by Republicans in their attempt to make capital over the fate of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who has been locked in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years and whose feeding tube was ordered removed by a Florida state judge at the request of her husband. At last, the case that had been considered by 19 judges in seven courts and appealed to the Supreme Court three times, which refused to hear it, seemed resolved. But Republican congressional leaders and President Bush seized upon the court ruling as the moment for “a great political issue,” as a memo circulated among Senate Republicans put it. The Democrats, it declared, would find it “tough,” and the conservative “pro-life base will be excited.” The president, who had hesitated for three days before making a statement on the tsunami last December, rushed from his Crawford, Texas, ranch back to the White House to sign the legislation…
Terri Schiavo cannot speak or gesture, but to true believers, she is making sounds only they can hear. They see what they want in order to believe and they believe in order to see. For the first time, public policy in the United States is being made on the basis of pitting invisible signs vs. science.
As in some tribal cultures, a confederacy of shamans — Bush, Frist and DeLay — have appeared to conduct rites of necrophiliac spiritualism. Only the shamans can interpret for the dying and control their spirits hovering between heaven and earth. Public opinion polls show overwhelming disapproval of the Republican position. But these polls are just so much social science. In this operation, for the tribe, there is no way of proving failure.
I feel sick. And if you want more on the anti-science front, read the Mystery Pollster, who is in a real snit about the charges that the network polls about Schiavo were biased, and he unloads on the hucksters deluded into thinking pretending lying asserting that these were “push polls”:
First, a plea for reporters, editors and bloggers of all ideologies: Can we please stop using the term “push poll” to describe every survey we consider objectionable? Yes, complain about bias when you see it, but the phrase push poll belongs to a higher order offense. To summarize the definitions posted online by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), The National Council on Public Polls (NCPP) and the Council for Marketing & Opinion Research (CMOR): A push poll is not a poll at all but rather a form of fraud – an effort to spread an untrue or salacious rumor under the guise of legitimate research. “Push pollsters” are not pollsters at all. They do not care about collecting data or measuring opinions (even in a “bogus” way). They only care about calling as many people as possible to spread a false or malicious rumor without revealing their true intent. Whatever complaint one might have about the wording or reporting of the ABC poll, it was certainly not a “push poll.”
End rant.
For additional clarification, an example of a push poll might be if a certain group of people supporting a certain candidate in the Republican primaries in South Carolina in 2000, facing strong opposition from another candidate, were to obtain a list of undecided voters, call them, and saysomething along the line of:
Would it change your opinion of [Candidate X] if you knew that he had adopted a black baby?
Would you be more or less likely to support [Candidate X] if you knew that he was gay?
Would it change your opinion of [Candidate X] if you knew that he cheats on his wife?
Would you be more or less likely to vote for [Candidate X] if you knew that he is a crook a liar?
How would you feel about[Candidate X] if you knew that he and was a coward and traitor who renounced the United States during his captivity in Vietnam?
That, folks, is a push poll. In the past, I have chosen to believe the people I have supported would have nothing to do with this sort of thing. I am not so sure anymore. But to assert that wording in a poll you disagree with makes it a “push poll” is absurd. I can excuse basic ignorance of polling and statistics and the methods of data collection, most of the people in my stats classes and reserach methods classes didn’t understand most stats either, but calling the network polls “push polls” is a new breed of stupid. I might add that the new Democratic reliance on the Mystery Pollster is pretty funny, considering they hated him/her when he/she was debunking all the nonsense about the statistical anomolies in Ohio in 2004.
And while I am venting my spleen, let’s discuss Joe Scarborough, someone who I think is normally pretty sane, and his hideous performance last night on Scarborough Country:
FIEGER: But the problem is, they